Scheme vs. CommonLisp vs. the World

[Martin Cracauer]

Marc Wachowitz writes:
> Kelly Murray <kem@Franz.COM> wrote:
> > Yet another BTW, I recall Scheme only has arrays of type "t".
> 
> Right, if we want to use Scheme, we'll have to define a library
> for low-level programming, and probably a way to declare types
> for efficiency where the compiler can't figure it out by itself.

MIT CScheme already does this. They have declarations like a subset of
Common Lisp's.

> However, most of that could remain conceptually very simple, and
> not introduce the whole complexity and ambiguous nature of Common
> Lisp's type specifiers. Experiences from the ML-Scheme interface
> camp might also be useful for that purpose (i.e. look whether we
> may want to make something explicit which they try to infer but
> can't do easily/reliably).

CMUCL's Python does much of this. 

I don't quite understand why you think CL's type specifiers are more
complex they can be given Common Lisp's big set of types. The syntax
could be improved, i.e. declare function parmeter and return types in
the lambda list, have a type-specfying let, but all this has already
been done by individuals for their own use amd doesn't require a CL
imcompatiblity. The biggest issue in getting simpler is to cook the
number of types down by moving things from a core language to
libraries.
 
Martin
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Martin Cracauer <cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de>
http://cracauer.cons.org
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